No Dice, Haley

Published: July 25, 1997

Haley Barbour did not exactly take the path of contrition at the Senate hearings on fund-raising abuses yesterday. On the subject of the $2.1 million loan from a Hong Kong businessman to a Republican Party think tank in 1994, Mr. Barbour tried to have it both ways. The former Republican Party chairman asserted that he never knew the money was foreign in origin, but that it would have been fine if it had been.

At one point, he tried the patience of the committee's Republican chairman, Senator Fred Thompson, who noted dryly that since Mr. Barbour had discussed the contribution with his Asian benefactor on a company yacht in Hong Kong harbor, it might have occurred to him that something was amiss.

It was the Democrats' turn yesterday to prove their contention that Republicans, too, abused the longstanding legal ban on foreign contributions to American political campaigns. The foreign money trail to the Republican Party followed a circuitous route. The ostensible source was a Florida subsidiary of a Hong Kong company, which supplied the collateral for a bank loan to a supposedly independent Republican think tank called the National Policy Forum. Testimony before the committee this week has made clear that the collateral actually came from the parent concern overseas. The loan then enabled the think tank, in turn, to transfer money to the Republican Party for use in key Congressional races in 1994.

Contrary to Mr. Barbour's repeated assertions, the committee established that he had been advised in 1994 that the collateral from the Hong Kong-based business family of Ambrous Tung Young was foreign in origin. Mr. Barbour asserted genially that he did not recall hearing any such thing. There was also a dispute among Republicans over whether the Young family was expected to turn any part of its loan into an outright donation.

Mr. Barbour's wobbliest contention was that the National Policy Forum was an independent, tax-exempt think tank like the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation, and therefore not covered by the ban on foreign contributions to political parties. In fact, the Forum was started with millions of dollars in loans from the Republican Party and was headed by Mr. Barbour while he was party chairman. The Internal Revenue Service eventually rejected its request for tax-exempt status after finding it to be a party subsidiary. Finally, the forum's president said at the time of his resignation in 1994 that the separation between the think tank and the Republican Party was ''a fiction.''

As for the quid pro quo with this money, Mr. Barbour acknowledged that he did Mr. Young the favor of introducing him to both Senator Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He then dismissed these assists as mere ''courtesy calls.'' But these meetings were no less inappropriate than the visits of foreign contributors to the White House under President Clinton.

These hearings may not pack the drama of ''E.R.,'' but there were plenty of lively exchanges between Mr. Barbour and his Democratic interrogators. Some Democrats, like Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, belatedly managed to muster the indignation that had failed them earlier, when their own party's use of foreign money was the topic.

Senator John Glenn, grasping the larger point, urged the entire committee at day's end to reform the system. Acknowledging that the Democratic lapses may well have been worse than the Republicans', he called on both parties to back campaign finance legislation that would finally ban unlimited contributions to parties and their affiliates.